Category: Uncategorized

Ice cream!

Until recently, I wasn’t much of an ice cream person.  My ambivalence was all the more shocking because (a) my dad is a huge ice cream nut and (b) I’ve spent the last four years at a school which sells ice cream from its very own on-campus dairy.  But I recently had an operation on my mouth and, for three weeks, I was unable to eat hard foods.  My diet was limited to soups, nutritional drinks, very mushy macaroni and cheese, and, of course, ice cream.  Even though my diet’s back to normal now, I seem to have developed a permanent craving for ice cream.

When I went to Cold Stone Creamery a while back, I fell in love with their Cake Batter ice cream.  But, though it is delicious, I’d prefer to not pay an arm and a leg for my ice cream.  Thankfully, I’ve found a cheaper alternative: Blue Bunny’s Birthday Party Cake ice cream!  It’s cake-flavored ice cream with swirls of blue frosting and little candy confetti pieces mixed in.   A bowl of that makes for a perfect way to end the day.  Yum!

Beginning of the Endgame

Tonight I finished making revisions  to A Theft of Bones based on my beta readers’ comments.  The most notable changes were the addition of a prologue and a new ending to the final battle.  There were also a number of dialog tweaks and scene adjustments.  In isolation, none of the changes are that dramatic, but, taken together, I think they make for a stronger manuscript.

I’ve sent the revised manuscript off to The Physicist and, if he doesn’t see anything wrong, I’ll be ready to start querying (AKA decorating one’s wall with rejection letters).

It feels good to be done with A Theft of Bones, for now at least.  I’ve had a blast writing it, but it’s time to push it out of the nest and see if it can fly.  Now I can begin work on my novel set in ancient Egypt.

The writing cycle begins anew…

Farewell to Facebook?

The Physicist and I had an interesting conversation today about leaving Facebook.  At one time,  such a course of action would’ve been unthinkable, but now it’s looking better and better.

I don’t remember exactly when I joined Facebook, but it was no later than the winter of 2005/6.  At that time, it was exciting and new and I marveled at being able to see what my friends were doing.  Every time I added a new friend, I got a little thrill.  I posted frequent status updates detaining the mundane details of my existence, largely because I could.

But, like many things, Facebook lost a lot of its luster over time.  As I got more and more friends, my NewsFeed became engulfed in a tidal wave of minutiae, from FarmVille updates to statuses posted while under the influence.  It was TMI every day.

Still, I clung to the idea that Facebook was useful because it helped me keep in touch with old friends.  On reflection, I’ve come to question whether that’s actually the case.  The mere fact of being someone’s friend on Facebook does not constitute ‘keeping in touch’ with them.  It’s one of the paradoxes of modern life that, although we know more and more facts about our friends, we end up knowing less and less of them.  I suppose most people see no reason to take the time to write a personal letter or email when they can convey their information coldly and clinically through a status update or a comment on a Wall.  It may be more efficient, but it lacks soul.

I’ve also been unnerved by Facebook’s endemic privacy problems.  Lately, they seem to be bound and determined to make you share your personal life with strangers.  I know it’s possible to go in and opt-out of a lot of this stuff, but it’s kind of galling that you have to do that in the first place.  Facebook used to feel like an intimate little club; now it’s as public as Union Station.  That makes it harder to connect with people on a meaningful level because you have so many more people looking over your shoulder.  True, you can go through and set your filters so that only certain people can see certain things, but, in my experience, that ends up being more of a hassle than its worth.

My mother is one of the few people I know who doesn’t have a Facebook account. She’s always said that she has no desire to bombard others with the details of her life, nor is she interested in being bombarded by others.  The more I think about it, the more I think she’s probably right.

Revising the revisions

I am pleased to report that A Theft of Bones has survived its first public outing.  Almost all of my beta readers have now reported back and I was touched by the obvious time and energy they’d put into reading my manuscript.

Going into the beta read, I harbored a lurking fear that I’d fall flat on my face.  I was afraid that the plot I’d so lovingly constructed would end up being utterly impenetrable to a normal audience, sending me back to the drawing board with my head slumped to my chest.  Happily, that was not the case: both plot and characters passed muster.

For the most part, there was very little overlap within the beta readers’ comments.  This is both a blessing and a curse.  On the one hand, it means that there’s not much that MUST be changed.  If most of them had told me that chapter 3 was crap or character X was unbelievable, I’d have to believe them and make changes accordingly.

But in the absence of that kind of consensus, I’m left with a number of things that COULD be changed.  Individually, they’re all good suggestions, but now I have to evaluate them in turn and decide whether or not to incorporate them.  When doing so, I’ll have to keep the following things in mind:

(1)  I can’t please everyone.  I can spend months and months and months struggling to incorporate every single suggestion only to have agents reject my work.  Even if AToB manages to get published, there will be people who think I should have done A, B, or C differently.

(2)  There is no such thing as a perfect novel.  This is not the best work I’ll ever do.  It would be sad if it were because it would mean that I’d peaked at 26.

(3)  Revising is important, but, eventually, I’m going to have to put my red pen down, take a deep breath, and send my manuscript out.  I can’t get caught in an endless cycle of fine-tuning.

Leaving the Ivory Tower

For the first time in 22 years, I’m no longer a student.  My Master’s degree was officially conferred last Sunday and today I handed in my office key and said goodbye to the department staff.

My life ended up taking a much different course than I had anticipated.  When I came to this large midwestern research university, I was enrolled in the History PhD program.  Getting a Master’s was supposed to be nothing more than a hoop I’d have to jump through before I could take my prelims.

But over the course of four years, the department changed.  We suffered an exodus of British historians which effectively crippled our British history program.  Class offerings dried up, forcing Europeanists such as myself to either take classes that had nothing remotely to do with their area of study or load up on independent studies.  Internecine squabbles within the faculty delayed much-needed hiring decisions.  A poor funding situation was made worse by archaic and outdated departmental policies that royally screwed graduate students.  All the ingredients were there for a perfect storm.

Even though the situation within the department was bleak, I still held out hope that, if I transferred to another school, things would be better.  But I came to realize that, even if I got a PhD elsewhere, I’d still face a tortuous path toward employment.  The Great Recession has devastated the academic job market as universities cancelled or postponed searches.  More ominously, the Recession seems to have accelerated the move away from traditional tenure-track positions in favor of adjunct professorships.  It’s not hard to see why university administrations like them so much.  They get more work for less money without having to offer the possibility of tenure (or even benefits, in some cases).

Of course, this sucks if you’re a grad student looking for a career in academia.  The academic job market has always been challenging, but most of us hoped that we’d eventually land a tenure-track position.  Now, it looks like a significant number of new PhDs will be doomed to spend most of their careers as adjuncts, probably making only a little bit more money than they made as grad students.  The real kicker is that, unlike our counterparts in the sciences, humanities PhDs can’t rely on a career in industry as a backup plan.  If you’re forced to go into a field other than academia, having a PhD isn’t going to help you much.

There came a point where I had to ask myself: why should I pursue a degree that’s probably not going to get me a job in academia and won’t better my chances of getting one outside of academia?  I still love history, but you don’t need a PhD to enjoy history and do the occasional bit of research.  And while it’s certainly scary trying to find a job in this crummy economy with a liberal arts degree, it would be even scarier to be 30+ and in the same position.

It’s been a great four years, but it’s finally time to come down from the Ivory Tower.

Man vs. Lobster

Last night, I decided I’d finally cook the lobster tail I had sitting around in my freezer.  After all, what could be tastier than a nice juicy lobster tail dipped in melted butter?

I soon discovered that preparing a lobster tail for cooking is about as much fun as smashing myself in the head with vol. 6 of Ramesside Inscriptions.  Even dead, lobsters manage to be nasty, grudge-wielding crustaceans that are determined to punish you for their death.

I thought I’d be fancy and ‘piggyback’ the lobster like they do in restaurants.  It seemed so simple: all I needed to do was slit the shell and then gently push the meat upward.  Of course, slitting the shell proved to be rather more difficult than I had anticipated, for this particular lobster must’ve eaten its Wheaties in life, giving it a well-nigh impregnable shell.  I was forced to hack and saw away with a combination of knives and scissors.  It wasn’t pretty.  Little bits of lobster shell were flying everywhere and it seemed I was making about a nanometer’s headway for every 15 minutes of hard labor.  Finally, after much effort, I managed to crack the shell all the way back to the tail and I started pushing the meat through.

Being gentle proved not to be an option.  I was eventually able to push it through, but, instead of an elegant mound of lobster meat, I was presented with a ragged and torn mass that made the lobster look like a slain ingenue from a splatter film.

Thoroughly concerned by this point, I decided to pop it in the oven and hope that baking would cure all defects.  When the appointed time came, I stuck my kitchen thermometer in and saw that it wasn’t quite heated through yet, so I put it in for a few more minutes.  Still not heated through.  When I checked a third time, it was finally done, so I sat down to enjoy my delicious lobster meal with some melted butter.

I took one bite, chewed it carefully, and decided to chuck the thing in the trash. Not only was it bland, but I also managed to overcook it, giving it a lovely rubbery consistency.  All my hard work was for naught.  So instead of an elegant feast fit for the elite, I ended up having cereal.

Ancient Egypt on the silver screen

I read today that Will Smith is planning to make a movie entitled The Last Pharaoh.  The title seems to be a bit of a misnomer since the movie is about Taharqa, one of the Nubian kings who ruled over Egypt during the Third Intermediate Period.  There’s really no way you can claim he was the last pharaoh.  In fact, he wasn’t even the last pharaoh of his own dynasty.

Apparently, Smith has hired Randall Wallace to write the screenplay.  Wallace has written screenplays for a number of historical epics, such as Braveheart, Pearl Harbor, and The Man in the Iron Mask. Interestingly, Wallace was also involved in writing  the computer game Titan Quest (quite frankly, given the game’s paper-thin storyline, he should probably leave that off his resume!).  While Wallace isn’t exactly known for his scrupulous historical accuracy, he does at least write entertaining screenplays.  That gives me hope that The Last Pharaoh might at least be enjoyable, even if it is bastardized history.

Oddly enough, ancient Egypt hasn’t been well served on the silver screen.  I’m trying to think of a truly good movie about ancient Egypt and I’m coming up blank.  Usually films about Egypt are undermined by a fatal combination of hackneyed story ideas and historical inaccuracies that make Cate Blanchett’s Elizabeth look like a scholarly monograph.  Which is a shame, really, because Egyptian culture is rich with ideas for good movies beyond the tired revived mummy trope.

Microsoft OneNote

I fired up my new copy of Office Enterprise the other day and, even though I’ll never use most of the programs, there is one program (besides Word) that I really like: OneNote.

OneNote is a digital note-taking program.  You can use it for just about anything, from taking notes in class or a meeting to researching travel destinations.  I’m using it to organize my writing research.

I’ve created a notebook for my Egyptian novel.  Within that notebook, I have tabs, such as ‘background info’ and ‘main characters.’  Under each tab, I have a variety of notes.  For example, each character has their own note with their vital statistics.  It’s wonderfully easy to flip between notes and all notes are searchable, so it doesn’t take long to find what you’re looking for.  You can even import handwritten notes from a Tablet PC and it will allegedly translate your chicken scratch into text.  I don’t have a Tablet PC, so I don’t know how well that works.  Seems like it could be a cool feature though.

But that’s not the best part.  OneNote allows you to clip webpages and PDF documents and incorporate them into your notes.  That makes research a lot less time consuming.

With Word and OneNote, I think I have the perfect replacement for Scrivener.

OpenOffice blues

Last week, the free trial of Microsoft Office on my new laptop expired.  I was reluctant to hand over a huge chunk of change to Microsoft for the full version of their product, so I decided to give OpenOffice a try.

This is not the first time I’ve tried OpenOffice.  When I first got my MacBook, I downloaded OpenOffice on the recommendation of the Physicist, who absolutely loves it.  I, on the other hand, was less than impressed.  I found it to be a buggy, unstable piece of crap that had difficulty doing simple tasks such as putting in lists with subpoints.  The only nice thing about it was the ability to save in PDF format.  After several weeks of putting up with its awfulness, I gave in and purchased MS Word for Macs.  And life was good.

But the Physicist assured me that OpenOffice ran better on a PC, so I tried it on my gaming laptop.  I didn’t play around with it much, but, at the very least, it seemed more stable.  When I downloaded OpenOffice last week, I had high hopes that I’d finally have a decent word processor that could replace Word.

I was wrong.  I didn’t have any problems with stability, but the program had discovered new ways to irritate me.  Using the insert comment short cut didn’t actually insert a comment.  Instead, it opened my note software.  OpenOffice is also unable to open the .docx format correctly.  If you try to open a .docx file that has footnotes, it will display them in the middle of the damn page.  Their predictive text feature is worthless (OpenOffice really wants me to name one of my characters ‘Pantyhose’).  Finally, after experiencing the nice layout of Word 2007, OpenOffice’s cheap copy of the Word 2002 interface was just annoying.

In the end, I decided to go with Microsoft Office.  As much as I hate to admit it, they did a really nice job with Office 2007.  Because I ordered it through my university, I’m going to get Office Enterprise, which has a whole bunch of crap I’m never going to use, like Access, Groove, and Communicator.  Oh well.  It’s better to pay less for more rather than paying more for less.

Happy Easter!

Tonight, I attended the Great Vigil of Easter.  This is the first Mass of Easter season and, as such, it’s the most important service of the church year.  It also happens to be my favorite service.

The service represents liturgical pomp and circumstance at its finest.  The vestments, the incense, and the progression from darkness to light all come together to create an experience that is sublimely holy.  After forty days of austerity and self-denial, it’s nice to celebrate again.

This particular Vigil was made even more special by the fact that one of the candidates for baptism happened to be a cousin of mine whose family I hadn’t seen in ages.  It was completely unexpected, yet wonderful to run into them and have an opportunity to catch up.

Filled with the joy of this festival day, I wish you all a very happy Easter.